Daily Archives: 23 juillet 2012

The use and sharing of scientific information at pharmaceutical companies: copyright-related challenges and solutions :

« The paper presents some of the challenges multinational pharmaceutical businesses face in managing copyright compliance due to the extensive and varied use of scientific information made by their employees. The paper also discusses some of the solutions to address these challenges, identifying specific questions and issues to be considered. »

Federated Search Service for OAI-compliant, Open-Access Repositories in India :

« Many of the research institutions and universities across the world are facilitating open-access (OA) to their intellectual outputs through their respective OA institutional repositories (IRs) or through the centralized subject-based repositories. The registry of open access repositories (ROAR) lists more than 2850 such repositories across the world. The awareness about the benefits of OA to scholarly literature and OA publishing is picking up in India, too. As per the ROAR statistics, to date, there are more than 90 OA repositories in the country. India is doing particularly well in publishing open-access journals (OAJ). As per the directory of open-access journals (DOAJ), to date, India with 390 OAJs, is ranked 5th in the world in terms of numbers of OAJs being published.
Much of the research done in India is reported in the journals published from India. These journals have limited readership and many of them are not being indexed by Web of Science, Scopus or other leading international abstracting and indexing databases. Consequently, research done in the country gets hidden not only from the fellow countrymen, but also from the international community. This situation can be easily overcome if all the researchers facilitate OA to their publications.
One of the easiest ways to facilitate OA to scientific literature is through the institutional repositories. If every research institution and university in India set up an open-access IR and ensure that copies of the final accepted versions of all the research publications are uploaded in the IRs, then the research done in India will get far better visibility. The federation of metadata from all the distributed, interoperable OA repositories in the country will serve as a window to the research done across the country.
Federation of metadata from the distributed OAI-compliant repositories can be easily achieved by setting up harvesting software like the PKP Harvester. In this paper, we share our experience in setting up a prototype metadata harvesting service using the PKP harvesting software for the OAI-compliant repositories in India. »

« This piece reports on some of the significant research and activities within the knowledge commons arena since the publication of Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom’s co-edited book Understanding Knowledge as a Commons in 2007. Hess uses this overview to identify major lacunae in the study of the knowledge commons. First, the relationship between local, indigenous knowledge and more globalised forms of knowledge is poorly understood. Second, the principles of local commons have not yet been tested against global commons, which may be characterised by regional inequalities. In both regards, careful case studies are needed to enrich our understanding of the knowledge commons. »

« Philosophers and social scientists from Hobbes to Hayek have debated the necessary and sufficient conditions for the making of states and markets, but there has been a remarkable lack of interest in the making of commons. This terra nullius of discourse is especially problematic when considering the making of the all important knowledge commons. In this paper I explore the making of a functioning commons off the coast of Maine (« the lobster commons ») and draw lessons from this process in exploring what would be the conditions for the making of the knowledge commons and the role universities can play in this making. »